High Performance Android Apps: Improve Ratings with Speed, Optimizations, and Testing

248 Pages·2014·10.81 MB·English

by  Doug Sillars

H igh Performance
Android
Apps
IMPROVE RATINGS WITH SPEED,
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OPTIMIZATIONS, AND TESTING s
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Doug Sillars
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High Performance Android Apps
Doug Sillars
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High Performance Android Apps
by Doug Sillars
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ISBN: 978-1-491-91248-5
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Table of Contents
Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
1. Introduction To Android Performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Performance Matters to Your Users 2
E-Commerce and Performance 2
Beyond e-commerce Sales 3
Performance Infrastructure Savings 4
The Ultimate Performance Fail: Outages 4
Performance as a Rolling Outage 6
Consumer Reaction to Performance Bugs 7
Smartphone Battery Life - The Canary in the Coal Mine 8
Testing Your App For Performance Issues 9
Synthetic Testing 9
Real User Measurements (RUM) Testing 9
Conclusion 10
2. Building an Android Device Lab. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
What Devices Are your Customers Using? 11
Device Spec Breakdown 12
Screen 12
SDK Version 13
CPU/Memory and Storage 13
What Networks are Your Customers Using? 13
Your Device is Not Your Customer’s Device 13
Testing 15
Building Your Device Lab 15
You Want $X,000 for Devices? 16
So What Devices Should I Pick? 17
Popular Yesterday 18
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Popular Today 18
Popular Tomorrow 18
Beyond Phones 19
Android Wear 19
Android Open Source Project Devices 19
Amazon 20
Other Android phones/tablets 20
Other 20
Remote Device Testing 21
Open Device Labs 21
Other Considerations 22
Conclusion 22
3. Hardware Performance and Battery Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Android Hardware Features 25
Less is More 26
What Causes Battery Drain 27
Android Power Profile 27
Screen 29
Radios 30
CPU 31
Additional Sensors 31
Get To Sleep! 32
Wakelocks and Alarms 33
Doze Framework 34
Basic Battery Drain Analysis 35
App Specific Battery Drain 38
Coupling Battery Data with Data Usage 41
App Standby 44
Advanced Battery Monitoring 44
BatteryStats 45
Battery Historian 49
Battery Historian 2.0 59
JobScheduler 62
Conclusion 67
4. Screen and UI Performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
UI Performance Benchmarks 69
Jank 70
UI and Rendering Performance Updates in Android 70
Building Views 71
Hierarchy Viewer 73
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Asset Reduction 86
Overdrawing the Screen 86
Testing Overdraw 87
Overdraw in Hierarchy Viewer 89
Overdraw and KitKat (Overdraw Avoidance) 92
Analyzing For Jank (Profiling GPU Render) 93
GPU Rendering in Android M 95
Beyond Jank (Skipped Frames) 97
SysTrace 97
Systrace Screen Painting 100
Systrace and CPU Usage Blocking Render 107
Systrace Update - I/O 2015 109
Vendor Specific Tools 112
Perceived Performance 112
Spinners: the Good and the Bad 112
Animations to Mask Load Times 113
The White Lie of Instant Updates 113
Tips To Improve Perceived Performance 114
Conclusion 114
5. Memory Performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Android Memory: How it Works 115
Shared vs. Private Memory 116
Dirty vs. Clean Memory 116
Memory Cleanup (Garbage Collection) 117
Figuring Out How Much Memory Your App Uses 120
Procstats 125
Android Memory Warnings 129
Memory Management/Leaks in Java 130
Tools for Tracking Memory Leaks 130
Heap Dump 130
Allocation Tracker 133
Adding a Memory Leak 134
Deeper Heap Analysis: MAT and Leak Canary 137
MAT Eclipse Memory Analyzer Tool 137
LeakCanary 144
Memory Summary 147
6. CPU and CPU Performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Measuring CPU Usage 150
Systrace for CPU Analysis 152
Traceview (legacy Monitor DDMS tool) 155
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Traceview (Android Studio) 158
Other Profiling Tools 162
Conclusion 164
7. Network Performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Wi-Fi vs. Cellular Radios 166
Wi-Fi 166
Cellular 166
RRC State Machine 167
Testing Tools 171
Wireshark 172
Fiddler 173
MITMProxy 175
AT&T Application Resource Optimizer 176
Hybrid Apps and WebPageTest.org 180
Network Optimizations for Android 180
File Optimizations 181
Text File Minification (Souders: Minify Javascript) 182
Images 183
File Caching 185
Beyond Files 188
Grouping Connections 188
Detecting Radio Usage in Your App 190
All Good Things Must Come to An End: Closing Connections 192
Regular Repeated Pings 194
Security in Networking (HTTP vs. HTTPS) 195
Worldwide Cellular Coverage 195
CDNs 197
Testing Your Application On Slow Networks 197
Emulating Slow Networks Without Breaking the Bank 198
Building Network Aware Applications 200
Accounting For Latency 203
Last Mile Latency 204
“Other” Radios 204
GPS 204
Bluetooth 204
Conclusion 207
8. Real User Measurements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Enabling RUM tools 210
RUM Analytics - Sample App 211
Crashing 213
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Examining A Crashalytics Crash Report 214
Usage 220
Real Time Information 225
Big Data to the Rescue? 225
RUM SDK Performance 225
Conclusion 228
A. Organizational Performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
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Preface
You are building an Android application (or you already have.) Despite this, are you
not totally happy with your apps performance? (why else did you pick up this book?)
Uncovering mobile performance issues is a job that is never complete. In my research,
I found that 98% of apps tested had potential performance improvements. The goal of
this book is to help understand the pitfalls of mobile performance, expose some of the
tools to test for issues so that you can catch any major performance issues in your mobile
application before it impacts your customers.
Studies have shown that customers expect mobile applications to load quickly, to rapidly
respond to user interactions, and be smooth and pleasing to the eye. As application get
faster, user engagement and revenues increase. Mobile applications built without an eye
on performance are uninstalled at the same rate as those that crash. Apps that ineffi‐
ciently use resources cause unnecessary battery drain. The #1 complaint to carriers and
device manufacturers is battery life.
I have spoken to thousands of developers about Android app performance over the last
few years, and few developers were aware of the tools available for solving the issues
they were having.
The consensus is clear: mobile applications that are fast and run smoothly are used more
often and make more money for the developers. With that information, it is surprising
that more developers are not using the tools that are available to diagnose and pinpoint
performance issues in their apps. By focusing on how performance improvements affect
the user experience, you can quickly identify the Return on Investment that your per‐
formance work has made on your mobile application.
Who Should Read This Book
This book covers a wide range of topics centering around Android Performance. Any‐
one associated with mobile development will appreciate the research around application
performance. Developers of mobile applications will find the arguments and issues
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